Between bribes and legal aid: 403 schools and kindergartens join Moldova’s official donation system
To ensure that a donation to an educational institution is not perceived as a bribe, it must adhere to legal procedures. In a report by journalist Alina Chiperi for the show "Morning with Radio Moldova," Angela Prisăcaru, the deputy head of the department at the Ministry of Education and Research, explained how parents can provide transparent support to schools and kindergartens.
Anyone can legally donate to a school or kindergarten. It can be a parent, a teacher, any person who wants to support the educational institution.
“To make a donation, one must access the government payment service MPay, choose the service: Donation for educational institutions, select the institution to which one wants to make a donation and indicate the amount they want to transfer. It can be done by card, internet banking or in cash. If the person does not want to pay electronically or does not have this possibility, the donation can be made at the bank or post office”, explained Angela Prisăcaru.
The representative of the Ministry of Education emphasized that transparency is essential when talking about the use of public money or donations. Therefore, the authorities have created a system that allows monitoring of these expenses.
"Educational institutions submit reports, display them in visible spaces so that any interested person can find out how these funds were used: how much the institution received as a donation and for what purposes the money was used", added the MEC official.
For legal donations, schools and kindergartens must be connected to the MPay government platform.
"Any educational institution, when it decides to connect to the MPay service, can do so simply by expressing its intention to the education department. Local departments collect these requests and send them to the Electronic Governance Agency, which directly establishes the connections to the MPay service", the official said.
According to data from the Ministry of Education and Research, 403 schools and kindergartens in the country are currently connected to the legal donations system.
